Sunday, January 12, 2020






Male Teacher Assaults Female Student Over “Women for Trump” Pin

A female high school student in Michigan reports that that she was assaulted by a male teacher when she wore a metal pin to school voicing her support for President Donald Trump.

Sadie Earegood is a junior who attends Mason High in Mason, Michigan. But when the 16-year-old wore her “Women For Trump” pin to school, she was confronted by an angry male teacher who “aggressively” grabbed the pin and detached it from her jacket.

The teacher, who has been identified as media technology teacher Paul Kato, first confronted Sadie, saying he didn’t like her pin. “That’s fine, you don’t have to like it, we can have our opinions,” she responded. But the teacher was not willing to let the matter go.

"He grabbed it and I pulled, I tried to push his hand away and he grabbed my shoulder," she described in an interview with a local news channel "(He) just kind of put his hand there, and then he started pulling more and more and I just started backing up."

The teacher then "took both hands and unlatched the pin from my jacket and put it upside down on his shirt and said it belongs upside down," Sadie explained. The incident occurred during school hours on December 5.

“He had no right to put his hands on my child over a pin or anything else,” said Sadie’s mother, Capi Earegood, who was very upset about the incident. “The First Amendment gives everyone the right to express their freedom of speech. No one should get that upset about someone wearing a political pin.”

“I was really shocked that a teacher especially would do that,” Sadie added, noting that “I just want him to know that it’s not okay to do that. I want this to be learning experience for other teachers. And I’m not going to stop wearing my political stuff.”

Sadie’s family filed a police report charging the teacher with criminal assault and larceny, but the Ingham County Prosecutors Office declined to file assault charges against the teacher claiming there was no credible evidence of criminal conduct.

The school district conducted an investigation and released a statement which read in part, "Following an investigation by the Mason Police Department, the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office declined to press criminal charges in the matter. Mason Public Schools officials have completed their internal investigation and have disciplined the teacher appropriately."

“While not criminal, the teacher’s actions were inappropriate and misrepresented the mission of the district,” added Ronald Drzewicki, Mason Public Schools Superintendent. “MPS staff are role models. Our core values include respect, responsibility and compassion. We expect all MPS staff to model these values in interactions at school, especially with students.”

SOURCE 





Connecticut school is denying students with racial quotas

When a school system draws racial boundary lines and denies entry to qualified students on the basis of race, it doesn’t matter if it’s done in the name of segregation or so-called diversity—it is still wrong, according to one prominent civil rights advocate.

Terrence Roberts, a member of the original “Little Rock Nine” who entered a segregated Arkansas high school under National Guard protection in 1957, appeared in front of a Connecticut parents union Dec. 5, criticizing the local Connecticut school board for instituting blatant racial quotas in its magnet school programs. 

Roberts, who has served as a professor of psychology at UCLA and a consultant, focused his ire on a Connecticut state law that mandates a minimum of 25% white and Asian students in the Hartford magnet schools. 

“Here in Connecticut, by lumping together whites and Asians, blacks and Hispanics, that’s playing a giant game of ‘Let’s you and him fight,’” he said in an interview with Gwen Samuel, the lead plaintiff in a court case challenging the racial quotas.

Because many Connecticut magnet schools draw primarily black and Hispanic applicants, if too few white and Asian kids enroll, the schools may deny spots in the school for the qualified black and Hispanic students who continue to apply. This creates absurd outcomes in these magnet schools such as empty seats in the school, while qualified black students get stuck on the wait list. 

The Connecticut school board justifies these quotas in the name of integrating the school systems. It points to a 1996 court case called Sheff vs. O’Neill that ordered the Connecticut education system to provide better opportunities for black students, thus sparking the construction of these magnet schools as integration devices. 

A state commission designed to enforce the Sheff decision established as a goal that 41% of Hartford students would be in “integrated” environments by 2013, which it defined as being at least 25% white and Asian. Without meeting that quota, a magnet school could be subjected to demagnetization and loss of funding.   

This has created a local controversy over which races “deserve” the limited spots in these magnet schools, which are widely viewed as gateways out of poverty. Roberts views this competition with distaste, having seen what this kind of identity politics has done in the past: strengthen constituents’ dependence on the people in charge.

“People don’t often realize this, but the powers that be pull the strings,” he said. “As long as they can have you battling it out, they have total satisfaction, because they don’t have to go in and beat you up.”

Members who attended Roberts’ lecture were inclined to agree. RJo Winch, a former Hartford city councilwoman, disputes the notion that the court order under Sheff vs. O’Neill expanded state authority to the point where they could arbitrarily deny entry to applicants to local magnet schools on the basis of race.

“Sheff. vs. O’Neill was about letting parents who wanted to send their kids to another school attend another [school],” Winch says, adding that the lead plaintiffs themselves simply wanted to have better options for their schooling—not necessarily a mandate for diversity quotas.

The Connecticut Supreme Court even admitted that lagging educational achievement was mostly a function of poverty, not race. This leaves the question: Why the zeal to integrate based on race specifically? Why the push for more suburban white people in these magnet schools, when it’s really the underserved black communities in Hartford that need the schools more? 

Indeed, there is something particularly uncomfortable with the board’s insistence that these gleaming magnet schools be built for the purpose of attracting white people, as if merely being around white people would improve the lives of these low-income black students, who are presumably suffering from much greater problems than the lack of white people in their classroom.

Roberts is certainly skeptical of this “white osmosis” theory, calling it demeaning to the ability of black students to form their own habits of excellence. He even pointed out imperfections in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education civil rights case for focusing its reasoning too much on the need for black students to be around white students to succeed.

“I think what happened with the Brown decision was somewhat problematic, because there was a great deal of emphasis put on the need for black people to feel better about themselves by being put in classrooms with white kids,” he said. “The real issue has always been resources, material resources, opportunities.”

And in Connecticut, such resources are being denied to these black and Hispanic kids to satisfy an arbitrary diversity quota.

Roberts called for vigilance against those who claim they are on your side but engage little with the actual community that they purport to represent.

“There are people out there who are doing white ally training,” he said. “I can just sense people going for the ally training and feeling good … they go home to suburbia and they got a certificate on the wall: ‘I was trained, I’m an ally.’” 

But then he adds: “In my mind, it is not that we have a problem, and we need allies to help us. No, it’s that the country is sick, it is diseased, and we all need to come together and figure out how to find a remedy to make it work.”

SOURCE 






Degrees to AVOID if you want to get a job straight out of university and it’s bad news for those studying communications, psychology and maths

Thousands of graduates are battling unemployment thanks to studying creative arts and maths at university.

While having a degree under your belt used to all-but guarantee landing a job, more employers are now happy to hire someone without a degree at all.

In its annual Graduate Outcomes Survey, Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching revealed the number of students securing a job straight after university has plummeted yet again to just 72 per cent.

Almost half of students who study creative degrees still aren't finding work four months after graduating, with 47 per cent languishing in unemployment.

Those who study maths and science are also struggling to find a job, as are those with a communications degree.

Meanwhile, to get the best value for money, students should instead opt for degrees in pharmacy, medicine, rehabilitation or dentistry.

Worst degrees for finding jobs

Percentage employed four months after graduating

Creative arts (52.9%)

Tourism and hospitality (56.4%)

Communications (60.1%)

Psychology (63.4%)

Science and maths (63.4%)

Source: Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, 2019

Of those who study pharmacy, 95.7 per cent have secured jobs within four months of leaving university - but are given the lowest average salary.

Young workers face 'systematically disadvantaged outcomes in the labour market', according to the Australia Institute's Dr Jim Stanford.

He said today's graduates are suffering with lower wages, as well a being the last to be hired - and the first to be fired.

In 2008, 85 per cent of graduates secured a job after leaving university.

This figure has fallen to just 72 per cent, down another percentage point from 2018.

Best degrees for finding jobs:

Percentage employed four months after graduating

Pharmacy (95.7%)

Rehabilitation (92.4%)

Medicine (91.1%)

Dentistry (86.2%)

Engineering (84.8%)

Source: Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, 2019

'You're better off with a degree than without one,' Dr Stanford told 7News at the time.

'But the outcomes have still deteriorated.'

As for salaries, undergraduate full-time salaries in 2019 ranged from highs of $88,200 to lows of $48,000, depending on the person's degree.

The best graduate salary awaits dentistry students, at $88,200.

For medical students it's $73,100 and for teach education it's $68,000.

The lowest salaries are reserved for those studying pharmacy, at $48,000.

Those with degrees in tourism and hospitality earned an average of $50,000, while creative arts graduates earned $52,000.  

'Higher level qualifications, on average, continue to confer additional benefits in the labour market, particularly for postgraduate coursework graduates,' the report explained.

'In addition, overall employment declined slightly to 92.7 per cent in 2019, a fall of 0.2 percentage points on the previous year.'

SOURCE  


No comments: